Free Pricing Calculator for Australian Businesses for Professional Services
For AU consultants, agencies and firms pricing engagements: enter your true cost to deliver and target margin to get a defensible fee, profit per project and equivalent markup.
Last updated 31 May 2026
Pricing professional services is harder than pricing a product because your main cost is people, and people are easy to under-cost. This pricing calculator helps Australian consultancies, agencies, accounting and engineering firms set fees that actually leave a margin once the unbillable hours are accounted for. Enter your fully loaded cost to deliver an engagement, including each person's time at salary plus 11.5% super and on-costs, then set the margin you need. The tool returns the fee to charge, the profit on the engagement and the equivalent markup. The trap in services is that quoting, scoping, account management and revisions are real costs that no client pays for directly, so they have to be carried by the margin on billable work. Get the cost base and margin right here, then read the guide for notes on utilisation, GST on fees and turning ad-hoc pricing into a consistent firm-wide standard.
How to use this tool
- 1
Enter your true cost to produce or deliver
Add up everything it costs to get one unit out the door: materials or stock at landed cost, direct labour at the wage plus 11.5% super, and any per-unit overhead like packaging, merchant fees or subcontractor charges. Use the cost excluding GST so your price is calculated on a clean base.
- 2
Set your target profit margin
Choose the percentage of the final price you want to keep as profit. A 40% margin means 40 cents of every dollar charged is gross profit. Pick a margin that covers fixed overhead and the return you need, not just the number that feels comfortable.
- 3
Read the recommended price, profit and markup
The calculator returns the price to charge (before GST), your dollar profit per unit, and the equivalent markup so you can compare it to how you usually quote. Add 10% GST on top if you are registered, then email the result to yourself to keep it on file.
Margin and markup are not the same number
This is the single most common pricing mistake Australian owners make, and it quietly erodes profit on every job. Markup is profit measured against your cost. Margin is profit measured against your selling price. They describe the same dollar of profit from two different angles, so the percentages never match. If a part costs you $120 and you add a 40% markup, you charge $168 and keep $48, which is only a 28.6% margin. If instead you want a genuine 40% margin, you charge $200 and keep $80. That gap of $32 per unit is the difference between a business that funds growth and one that runs on fumes. The formula the calculator uses is price = cost / (1 - margin). To go the other way, markup = margin / (1 - margin). A 50% margin equals a 100% markup, not 50%. Many trade and wholesale businesses think in markup because suppliers quote that way, while accountants and lenders think in margin. Knowing both, and being able to translate between them on the spot, means you never accidentally agree to a discount that wipes out your profit. This calculator shows both figures side by side so the conversation with a customer, a supplier or your bookkeeper always uses the right number.
Build your cost base correctly before you price
A price is only as good as the cost figure behind it, and most underpricing starts with an incomplete cost. Capture three layers. First, direct materials or stock at landed cost: the supplier price plus freight, import duty and any wastage you cannot bill. Second, direct labour. In Australia that means the hourly wage plus 11.5% superannuation (rising on the legislated schedule), plus your share of payroll tax, workers compensation and leave loading. A $40 hourly wage realistically costs you closer to $55 to $60 once on-costs are added, and pricing off the bare wage is a fast way to lose money. Third, per-unit variable overhead: merchant and payment fees (often 1.5% to 2% on cards), packaging, delivery, software licences attributable to the job, and subcontractor charges. Keep GST out of the cost figure you enter. If you are GST registered you claim the GST you pay as a credit, so it is not a real cost to you, and you add GST on top of the final price separately. Quote net of GST, calculate your margin on that clean base, then present the GST-inclusive total to the customer so there are no surprises at invoice time.
Choose a margin that survives discounts, dead time and bad debts
Your target margin is not just the profit you would like, it is the buffer that absorbs everything that goes wrong between quote and bank deposit. Three forces eat into it. Discounting: if you routinely knock 10% off to win work, price as if that discount is already given so the headline margin still leaves you whole. Non-billable time: in service businesses, quoting, travel, admin and rework can consume 30% to 40% of the week, so the margin on billable hours has to carry the unbillable ones. Bad debts and slow payers: under the Australian financial year cash-flow cycle, money tied up in 60-day receivables has a real cost, and the occasional write-off has to be funded from somewhere. As a rough guide, retail and hospitality often target 50% to 70% gross margin, trades 25% to 45% depending on materials, and professional services 50% or higher because labour is the main input. Set your margin once you know your monthly fixed overhead and the volume you can realistically deliver: price = (fixed costs + desired profit) spread across expected units, cross-checked against this calculator. Revisit it whenever wages, the super rate or supplier prices move, because a margin set two years ago is almost certainly too low today.
From a one-off calculation to consistent pricing across the team
Running the numbers once is easy. The hard part is making sure every quote your business sends uses the right cost base and the right margin, every time, even when you are not the one writing it. In most growing AU businesses, pricing lives in someone's head or a sprawling spreadsheet, so staff round numbers, forget to update supplier costs, drop margin to win a job, or quote off the old wage rate before the last super increase. Multiply that across hundreds of quotes a month and the leakage is real money. This is where pricing stops being a calculator problem and becomes a systems problem. Clever Ops builds pricing logic directly into the tools your team already uses: live supplier costs feeding your quoting software, margin floors that flag a quote before it goes out underpriced, GST and super on-costs applied automatically, and a single source of truth so the apprentice and the owner quote the same way. If you find yourself re-checking the same sums on every job, that is a strong signal the calculation should be automated rather than repeated. Book a free assessment and we will map where your pricing leaks and what it would take to lock it in.
Pricing services: cost the whole engagement, not just the billable hours
The number that sinks professional services firms is utilisation. If a consultant on a $120,000 salary is genuinely billable only 60% of the time, every billable hour has to recover the salary, the 11.5% super, payroll tax, leave, software, office and the 40% of the year spent on sales, admin and learning. The true cost of that hour is often double the naive salary-divided-by-hours figure. When you enter your cost to deliver, build it from the loaded cost of every person on the engagement and include the proportion of non-billable time that work consumes, not just the hours you will write on the invoice. Then set a margin that funds partner profit, business development and the inevitable scope creep that you will absorb rather than re-negotiate. For fixed-price work, this matters even more: a scope blowout you cannot bill comes straight out of margin, so price in a contingency. On GST, your fees attract 10% GST if you are registered, quoted on top of the fee, and you claim credits on your inputs, so keep GST out of the cost and margin math. Many firms still price on gut feel or last year's rate card, which means the same service is sold at different margins by different people. A clear cost-plus-margin model, applied consistently, ends the discounting that quietly turns a busy firm into an unprofitable one.
Worked example
A Sydney wholesaler is setting the list price for a new product line and wants a clean 40% gross margin to cover warehousing, freight and card fees.
- Cost to produce or deliver (ex GST)
- $120.00
- Target profit margin
- 40%
Recommended price: $200.00 ex GST ($220.00 inc GST). Profit per unit: $80.00. Equivalent markup: 66.7%.
Because price = cost / (1 - margin), $120 / 0.60 gives $200, not the $168 you would get by naively adding 40% to cost. That mistake would leave only a 28.6% margin and cost the business $32 of profit on every single unit, which is why the equivalent markup of 66.7% is shown alongside the margin.
Who uses this tool
Marketing and creative agencies
A Melbourne agency costs a campaign at $9,600 in loaded staff time across strategy, design and account management, and wants a 55% margin to cover pitching time it never bills. The calculator sets the fee at $21,333 ex GST, exposing that the firm's habitual $15,000 quote was running at just 36% margin.
Accounting and bookkeeping firms
A Perth accounting practice prices a fixed annual compliance package. Loaded cost to deliver is $1,800 and the partner wants a 60% margin to fund advisory growth. The tool returns a $4,500 fee ex GST, giving the practice a clear, repeatable number instead of re-quoting from memory each year.
Engineering and IT consultancies
A consultancy scopes a project at $48,000 of loaded engineer time including 11.5% super and 65% utilisation, targeting a 50% margin to absorb scope creep. The calculator outputs a $96,000 fixed price ex GST and flags that a 10% discount to win it would cut margin to 44%.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a pricing calculator and a markup calculator?
A pricing calculator starts from your cost and a target profit margin and tells you the price to charge. A markup calculator works from cost and a markup percentage. They overlap, but margin and markup are different bases: margin is profit as a share of price, markup is profit as a share of cost. This tool gives you the recommended price and the equivalent markup together, so you can use whichever your industry quotes in.
Does the calculator include GST?
No, and that is deliberate. You should enter your cost excluding GST and the tool returns a price excluding GST, so your margin is calculated on a clean base. If you are registered for GST in Australia, add 10% on top of the recommended price to get the figure the customer pays. The GST you collect is not yours to keep; it is remitted to the ATO on your BAS, so it should never be counted as profit or margin.
How do I set the right target margin?
Start from your fixed monthly overhead and the profit you need, then work out the margin that covers both across the volume you can realistically deliver. Account for discounting, non-billable time and slow-paying customers, because all three eat into the headline figure. As a guide, retail often runs 50% to 70%, trades 25% to 45%, and professional services 50% or more. Review the margin whenever wages, the 11.5% super rate or supplier costs change.
Should I include my own time as a cost?
Yes, especially in service and trade businesses. If you do not cost your own labour at a fair rate plus on-costs, you are subsidising the price out of your wage and the real margin is lower than it looks. Treat every hour you or your team spend on a job as a direct cost, including the 11.5% superannuation you would pay an employee, then apply your target margin on top of that complete figure.
What is a good profit margin for an Australian small business?
There is no single number; it depends entirely on your industry's cost structure. Capital-light services can hold 50% gross margin or more, while materials-heavy trades and food businesses run lower because inputs dominate the price. What matters is that the margin covers your fixed overhead, leaves a return for the risk you carry, and survives the discounts and dead time built into your week. Compare your figure to industry benchmarks and your own profit and loss, not to a generic target.
Can I use this calculator for services as well as products?
Absolutely. For services, your cost to deliver is mostly labour: the hourly wage plus 11.5% super, payroll tax and workers compensation, plus any per-job materials or subcontractor charges. Enter that total cost and your target margin, and the calculator returns the price you should charge for the job. It is just as valid for a fixed-price quote as it is for a product, as long as the cost figure captures every hour and on-cost involved.